Like, imagine if the USA (for example) had been run by King Clinton ever since his father, who had gained his power by killing King Roosevelt, was assassinated, but the Tea Party helped Prime Minister Obama take over while he was out of town, and then, despite this, Obama was having members of the Tea Party killed, and the Tea Party had military support from a warmongering anarcho-capitalist China during their long drawn-out power struggle with the Australian Empire.

Then we could totally compare it with pre-theocratic Afghanistan!_________________butts

I dunno, mouse. Afghanistan circa the 1960s might be comparable to wherever you live IF you have a recently established and probably corrupt monarchy with a long history of relatively frequent violent coups that is currently trying out a new experimental democracy that would quickly be replaced by a 'republic' hoping to exterminate an extremist political party that developed during the experimental democracy with strong tie-ins to massively violent outside world powers that ultimately kill a million of your citizens and bring the ire of their main opposing world power, and THEN, once your country is completely fucked over by the two of them, have a few draconian religious fanatics gain massive influence *deep breath*

but if that's the case I don't know how one could fail to be open to the possibility that one's country MIGHT not be entirely stable

and Yinello has been pretty obvious about not being from Afghanistan, I think

well, one could argue that the bush dynasty is a monarchy (in their eyes, at least), and certainly many of us see the 2000 election results as a judicial coup. and whatever the republican congress is practicing now does seem to be some new form of "democracy" (it's certainly not the democracy i grew up with!). i'm sure fox news would happily exterminate large parts of the citizenry, if they every get their military wing up and running (you all know that's where glen beck has disappeared to, he's training a militia up in his gold-bar funded doomsday retreat). one could argue that draconian religious fanatics already have a massive influence - just look at the role of the texas school people in determining text books for the rest of the country.

but seriously - i look at those pictures of afghan women in the 70's and 80's, and i think about where, say, abortion rights were in the US then, and i see the efforts that are being made (that are successfully being made!) in clawing those back; i hear the idiot remarks certain supreme court justices are making regarding how terrible it would be to stop the super-rich from essentially buying elections... and no, maybe we don't have to worry about russian tanks and chinese tanks (or even roving bands of fox and npr fanatics) battling for control over the ruins of our cities - but you don't have to have a monarchy to have a corrupt government; other things than wars destroy economies; and once a small group has real power, they really can fuck over the majority.

it's not about afghanistan being unstable. it's about afghanistan regressing so dramatically in allowing its people to have rights and opportunities. it's about the fact that women who trained as doctors and lawyers now have to stay hidden in their houses; that their daughters and granddaughters risk disfigurement and death just for trying to get a basic education. the afghan monarchy didn't do that, the russians didn't do that, the war didn't do that - the taliban did.

look at the outright lies a significant chunk of the american people believe, about obama, about the ACA, about basic science and women's reproduction and any number of things. according to stephen colbert (admittedly, not a perfect source) there is a group of truckers who plan to spend the weekend driving around the beltway and screwing up traffic - because they want obama to leave office. they think they are going to have 100,000,000 people joining them. how many will they have opposing them? how easy would it be for even a simple road-rage incident to trigger a riot? how easy for the riot to spread? there are an awful lot of extremely angry people with, yes, extremist views. no, maybe they can't topple the government - do they need to, when their voices (not that many voices!) result in shutting the thing down?

saying "oh, we're not as screwed up as afghanistan"...that doesn't mean we can't screw ourselves up royally in our own homegrown way.

and i know Yinello lives in the Netherlands, just her comment coming right after those pictures suggested she had a personal connection to afghanistan. maybe she was talking about some other country, just out of the blue - that's why i asked._________________aka: neverscared!
a flux of vibrant matter

Nah, I'll just be going around reminding people that a significant portion of the population supports the Affordable Care Act, yet opposes "Obamacare", just in case they have any lingering faith in their country's informed voting public_________________butts

except I deleted my facebook account months ago, and while I doubt that they've actually taken their grubby little paws off of the information my profile had contained, there's no indication of them bringing it back

For those living in the US, the EPA has a website that tells you about your power company's energy mix and emissions compared to the national average. Enter your zip code and then your utility company and it'll give you the breakdown on non-hydro renewables, hydro, nuclear, and oil/coal/gas sources of power. It'll also show your region's emissions compared to the national average for CO2, SO2, and NO2 in lbs/MW.

Despite using less hydro, non-hydro, natural gas, and slightly more coal than the US at large, my region uses almost twice as much nuclear power and so has lower emissions across the board.

At the bottom of the page are links to information and calculators to figure out your home's emission footprint, tips for improve your efficiency, and where to enroll in a program for buying cleaner power (as well as the price premium per kW/hr for doing so, about 3-4 cents in my case).